• November 28, 2008

LinkedIn has released new search features to its more than 31 million business professionals who use the social networking site.

Features include suggestive search of contact, streamlined search results, customizable view, take action or modify searches, and saved searches. LinkedIn eliminated the need to switch tabs when looking at results listing names of professionals from outside the searcher's network. The new search retrieves the most relevant professionals from the entire LinkedIn community.

Personalized search has been added to let users customize their view of queries. The feature relies on a relevance algorithm that places the user's in-network contacts at the top of the first query page. LinkedIn also lets users take action straight from search results. Mouse over the query to find links that let users, for example, send an InMail to get introduced to someone through a common contact in the subscriber's network.--Laurie Sullivan